Memoir - barlowbooks

Between 1869 and 1948, Britain sent more than 100,000 “home children” to Canada to work as indentured farmers and domestics. They were promised a bright future in the land of opportunity, and some managed to make a good life but many were abused, neglected, and reviled by those who took them in. Although most still had families back home, reunification was discouraged. One of those children was Winnie Cooper. Born in the slums of Scarborough, Yorkshire, in 1908, she was sent at age twelve to Barnardo’s Village Home for Girls near London. Three years later, Winnie was shipped off [...]

When Dr. Paul Garfinkel started his career in psychiatry in the 1970s, psychoanalysis dominated the profession. Then the pendulum swung the other way. Psychoanalysis was discredited and drugs became the treatment of choice for mental illness. Throughout his career, Garfinkel has struggled to find a balance between these two poles, between compassion and human touch on one hand and the rigour of science and the prescribed drugs that have revolutionized psychiatry on the other. Though it was sometimes not popular, he held steadfast to his belief that medicines combined with psychotherapy are often better than either one alone. In this [...]

Dr. Abdallah Daar, a world-renowned transplant surgeon, scientist, bioethicist and global health expert, is a Tanzanian born into Swahili culture, with ancestral roots in Arabia, the Caucasus Mountains, and Ethiopia. This memoir chronicles the exploration of his multiple identities, taking the reader on an absorbing journey to Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Zanzibar, South Africa, Idi Amin’s Uganda, London, Oxford, the Middle East, the US, Canada, and beyond. We meet slaves, royalty, great heroes, Nobel Prize winners, and mass murderers. It is an impassioned call to resist the polarization that is wrenching apart people of different “races,” cultures and religions. Inspired [...]

Fredrik Eaton wrote this entertaining memoir for his family and friends. He tells the story of what it was like to grow up as a member of the Eaton family in Toronto during the heyday of the department store chain, and how he ran the company until 1988, nine years before it filed for bankruptcy protection. Eaton gives readers an inside look at his life in London, where he served as Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom from 1991–1994, his philanthropic work, and his love for big game hunting, fishing, and sailing. The Eaton memoir is available on request [...]

​Heenan Blaikie was one of Canada’s leading law firms that boasted 1,100 employees and once had two former prime ministers on its staff—Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien. When it collapsed in February 2014, lawyers across Canada and the business community were stunned. What went wrong? Why did so many lawyers run for the exit? How did it implode? What is it that holds professional partnerships together? This is the story of the rise and fall of a great company by the ultimate insider, Norman Bacal, who served as managing partner until a year before the firm’s demise. Breakdown takes readers [...]

This is the story behind the invention of the medical version of the paper clip—the in-motion cardiac stress test, which has saved millions of lives in the last 50 years. It plays out at the legendary Johns Hopkins University, at a pivotal moment in the scientific history of the heart. But this memoir begins in the war, in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, where Ivan Likar, a boy with little formal education, had to find his way out.